Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Word Wall Before and After


3rd grade is growing on me....one of the things that takes up a huge amount of space on the wall but doesn't seem to be very interactive or a tool for the students it was created for.  Here is a picture of my old Word Wall.
I loved the colors.  I loved the student done words.  I did not love that once the word was up, it was never referred to.  Then I stumbled across Mrs. 3rd Grade's Blog and found some inspiration.
Each letter on the word wall is portable.  SO clever!  We can add words I purposefully choose.  We can add words students frequently use and need to refer to.  We can add words we find as we read.  My next step was figuring out where I would put such a thing.  All the walls I had left were low and in frequently traffic-ed places where they probably wouldn't last too long.  I do have lots of giant windows and spent the afternoon trying to figure out how to make them work.  I love the 3M hooks, but didn't want the back of the window to look messy with 26 little hooks showing through the other side.   Then my aha came!
A bucket with paper for adding more words the the rings.




After moving this summer, I had a leftover curtain rod and hooks.  I grabbed a couple of the bigger 3M hooks for the ends of the of the curtain rod.  Attached to each clip is a loose leaf ring.  Then I made a cover letter for each stack of blank paper and throughout the year we will add to it!  I can't wait to see this in action!

Happy Tuesday,

4 comments:

  1. Glad you're enjoying grade 3! And cool idea with the curtain rods. One way I make the word wall more interactive is a game called "read my mind" where I give them five clues about the secret word and they write down their correctly spelled guess each time.

    Grade ONEderful

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  2. I totally missed the fact that you were changing grades. I hope you end up falling in love. Your word wall looks great. :)
    ❀ Tammy
    Forever in First

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  3. Love the word wall on the curtain rod. It is very inspiring!
    I Have 2 Questions

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